This week’s edition of The Economist has a series of articles focusing on the European financial crisis.

If we want to understand what is happening in Europe and the rest of the world I suggest we need to start by going back to the blackboard.

When my economics professors stood in front of the blackboard most of them drew a graph with two lines in the form of an x. The macroeconomic professors usually labelled one as representing the economy in financial terms and the other as representing the economy in real or physical terms. This is an important distinction which tends to be forgotten when we analyze problems away from the blackboard. It is to easier to look at an economy in terms of its currency.

It is important to note that these two lines intersect so that what happens on one side will influence what happens on the other side.

So we need to ask if the current European crisis and if the crisis in the rest of the world is really a financial crisis or is it a crisis on the physical side, in the resource base, which is showing up in financial terms.

There are some people who believe we are using up resources at a rate which is beyond sustainability. If this is the case it is no wonder the people of this planet are dealing with a multitude of economic problems.

The Economist is pushing for policies which its writers believe will restore growth. It may be that instead we need to look for policies to manage negative growth. The problem with policies to create more growth is that they will probably lead to even more using up of resources and will thus bring forward an even worse economic crash.

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Cover Notes

After my first family broke up I went to the University of British Columbia and did a degree in economics because I was intrigued by the way in which money is created and because I wanted to understand the dynamics of how we exchange goods and services.

I concluded economics is mostly about relationships and we should evaluate economic policies by how they contribute to good relationships.

We have two major economic problems with which we should be dealing. The first is that while we have lots of energy and mineral resources left on this planet, we have used up the most easily accessible. Those that are left require an excessive amount of energy to extract. The second major problem is that our so-called "market" economy is largely based on legislation which restricts competition and thus allows some people an unequal share of the agricultural surplus.

To deal with these problems we need to focus our economy on a policy of sharing in the same way that families and people in small-scale societies share their food. We also need a universal guaranteed income scheme AND a new way of creating money. This would be a tremendous transfer of decision-making power from governments and bankers to individuals.

In this book you will learn:

why the economic principles of marginal cost and the elasticity of the demand curve say it should be priced at 99 cents.

why relationships are an important part of economics.

what it takes to make a good relationship.

that our civilization is based upon a huge agricultural surplus which should be considered an inheritance to be shared equally by everyone.

how the financial and the physical aspects of the economy interact.

how money is created out of thin air and the problems this creates for our well being.

how we can finance a guaranteed annual income scheme.

how to become a part of the ten percent,

how not to become a slave.

The list of ebook stores from which you may download this book is at the top of the home page.

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